Frank Zappa’s “Uncle Meat” is one of the most extraordinary records released in the 1960s, its sonic signature is so distinctive and so ineluctably alien, and it’s really not even a rock album, in the conventional use of the word. Although “Uncle Meat” is easy enough to sit through, it takes multiple plays to even begin to come to terms with it, and to process its irreducible complexity. “Uncle Meat” was never going to trouble even the margins of the mainstream, and its experimentalism would mean that, for decades, it was difficult to assess its importance within any specific context, but musically, it would go on to define a whole genre that sprang up in the UK and Europe in the early ‘70s – that of art rock groups like Henry Cow, The Art Bears and Universe Zero, the “rock in opposition” movement of the late ‘70s. Zappa’s album is one amongst several in his artistic lifetime that can truly be named as a genre-unto-itself, and still sounds utterly unique.